If you enjoyed my post on The Case for Hosted Exchange, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s going to get even better. This post from Mary Jo Foley explains it all:

On March 3, Microsoft will be opening up a beta of Microsoft-hosted SharePoint and Exchange (via which Microsoft hosts your service and your data) to companies of any size.

…customers of any size can request a spot in a limited beta for Microsoft-hosted e-mail, calendaring, shared workspaces, and web conferencing and videoconferencing. Microsoft officials said the final version of these standalone Microsoft-managed services will be available sometime in the latter half of 2008.

Microsoft also is working on a bundle of Microsoft-hosted business services, which it is calling its Business Productivity Online Suite. That bundle will include Microsoft-hosted Exchange, SharePoint, OCS and Live Meeting.

Microsoft are now addressing The Long Tail of people who need business services. This is my favourite bit:

Microsoft is going to allow customers who have purchased licenses for Microsoft’s Exchange and SharePoint Server software (not the Microsoft-hosted versions of these products) to trade-in license credits for Microsoft Online managed service versions of these products; or a mix of on-premise and Microsoft-hosted versions.

Under existing licensing models, Microsoft have a strict “no-mix” policy. You can’t mix licenses acquired under a Service Provider License Agreement (SPLA) and retail/volume/open licenses. SPLA is per-user (or per-CPU) / per-month. This is one of the reasons that Hosted TFS: TFS Now’s licensing appears quite high.

I’m not sure what Darren was thinking of when he posted this quote of the week, but it fits nicely for this bit of news:

Out-source your muscles, in-source your brains.

Why bother spending precious IT dollars on keeping Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communicator running - when you can outsource it? Free your bright IT people from the horrors of tech support, weekend “server down” alerts, constant “I can’t connect to Exchange” calls - and have them adding value to your users, your business and your customers.

Obviously there’s some things that will need to be addressed with the moved to offsite managed services:

• How do you authenticate? Do you have a username/password on every outsourced provider? Do you have federation with your own domain? What about hosted-AD?
• How do you backup? Are you comfortable with leaving it in the hands of others? I am, others might not be. How do you sell that?
• Do you trust somebody else with your data? (Leon does… kind-of)

Another interesting Software as a Service (SaaS) product I came across recently is saasu. Think MYOB but better, online & also Australian. The Quick Tour is a good place to start but mind the annoying flash movie. Automatic email invoicing, Online banking connectivity, Bulk payroll, REST API, etc.